Beginnings
The player character classes to be included at this stage were....
Warrior
- no magical abilities but big and tough.
Crusader
- exactly like warrior but a little less brawn and some clerical spell abilities.
Archer
- a long distance fighter with limited elemental magic for up close fighting if needed.
Cleric
- another step away from the warrior but heavily relying on offensive and defensive spells for combat.
Sorcerer
- the anti-thesis of the warrior with no physical combat abilities and only relying on elemental magic for combat.
Druid
- the druid is a mix of the cleric and sorcerer, being able to use spells from both classes but sacrificing on might.
early character sheets...
The Archer here is wearing green pants in these pics and an alternate countdown display can be seen. There are different "Secrets of the Sphinx" map textures and level design shown as well.
Here we can see a Dragon on the map "Dungeon Rescue" and also notice that it has different building textures.
The Story
Some sort of scholastic accident transports the King's trusted advisor, one Zephram Dagrath, to another world in a weird dimension. It's the job of the six player characters to bring him home.
But...there's a catch.
Zephram has gone insane with delusions of omnipotence. A shaman named Teldran will direct the players to collect four magic artifacts from four unique worlds that can put an end to this chaos.
Once you've outfitted yourself in the starting town, you'll proceed to Teldran. He'll offer you the choice of adventures. The available adventures are based on your character's levels and how far you've advanced through the game. Completing the adventure rewards the player with skill improvement points and a cool class specific item. But each character can only obtain this unique item once, so you might not want to sell it.
The game would of had over 20 Quests that fell into several story lines. Players could of been asked to find and kill an enemy that had been harassing a nearby village, rescue items or people from dungeons, escort caravans, sneak into enemy camps for theft or assassination, or escape from captivity in the heart of a dungeon. The random dungeon generator would of been used to create new experiences as well.
we can see the RPG HUD shots in these pics...
A new direction..
About 6 months later New World Computing decided to move away from its original concept of Legends of Might and Magic as an online RPG to a pure action game set in a fantasy world.
Legends executive producer Jeffrey Blattner had this to say..
"We got to a certain checkpoint some time ago and examined what we had. One thing we pride ourselves on at New World is the gameplay, and we just didn't feel like we would be able to deliver a fun experience for people with what we had at the time, so at that point a decision was made to not proceed in the original direction, and instead we decided to make a different type of game."
"The Might and Magic series is already so varied in terms of game play anyway. We have the Heroes strategy series and the tried and true Might and Magic RPG series, and everyone was really interested in branching out into an action style game, so that's how we found ourselves here. The original goal of Legends was to deliver the first online Might and Magic game, and we're still going to do that."
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and that was the start of what we now know today as Legends of Might and Magic.
LoMM turns FPS
Long ago before the LoMM game as we know it today existed, there was a different concept in mind for it.
LoMM was supposed to be an Action/RPG with cooperative multi-player adventure for up to 6 players to join over the net. Players would of been adventuring through 4 separate worlds trying to stop an evil lunatic named Zephram Dagrath who was set on traveling back in time to change the future.
There was supposed to be a random adventure generator as well as a 16 player death match mode for those not wanting to mission with others. Lastly there was supposed to be a Player vs Monster arena to practice against any of 50 diff monsters.
LoMM was turning into a First Person Shooter. Here are some early screenshots that show development of a few lomm elements. The HUD is a lot different in these shots and we can see changes in graphics, fonts, time, and money display.
Below we can see early "Rescue at the Ruins" map pre-release game play shots.
There is a Titan, Evil Eye, and a Terror Eye seen that never made it to the maps final level release.
We can also see different building textures for the ruins and bridge here as well.
These few shots here are kinda special if you notice whats in them. If you've played LoMM long enough you might just recognize them from the game loading sequence pic.
early lomm build screenshots...
some different style HUD shots in these pics...